So this is another book I accumulated from Paperbacks From Hell, and it’s really two novellas. When I read the excerpt, I was hooked because the first story reminded me of Room, which terrified and captured me. I guess one of my fundamental fears is being trapped in a single room all alone. But this story predates Room by thirty, forty years?

A sixteen-year-old woman is accidentally trapped in a network of caves underneath a farm after a cellar door closes on her. She has no light and no companions. Only brackish water and slugs and fungus to eat. Yet somehow she lives and gives birth to a child and raises it. It’s so eerie and it moves along at a breakneck clip. Can you imagine what Morlocks these people must look like?

The second story is less scary. It’s about a mentally deficient (in the eighties, she would have been called “retarded” but apparently we don’t use that word anymore) woman who slowly starts to recover her faculties (kind of a Flowers for Algernon thing) through the power of… love? I didn’t like this one as much because it’s not scary and it ends abruptly.

These books are great because they remind me of what the horror genre must have been in its heyday when you had Stephen King leading the charge for a ton of great authors and intriguing concepts. But when the eighties left and the yuppies deserted us and the coke blew away in the wind, King was the only one left remembered.